King Cy-ze start for Lester

Author(s):

John Tomase

Three starts, three Cy Young Award winners, three Red Sox wins.

Just how Jon Lester wanted to start the 2013 season.

Though Lester took a no-decision in yesterday’s 2-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Rays, he deserved a game ball of some kind for matching defending AL Cy Young winner David Price pitch for pitch. Lester limited the Rays to a run on five hits in seven innings, throwing 100 pitches before handing things over to the bullpen.

Coming on the heels of wins over former Cy Young winners CC Sabathia and R.A. Dickey, Lester has proven early in this season that he belongs among the handful of best pitchers in the game.

“You know going into the game who you’re pitching against,” Lester said. “The biggest thing is that you can’t worry about that. You can’t worry about, ‘OK, we’ve got Price’ — or Sabathia or whoever it may be. You start worrying about the pitcher, you’re worrying about the wrong things. But obviously in the back of your mind, you know, ‘I’ve got to keep these guys close and give them a chance to maybe put a big inning together against him.’ ”

The Red Sox never mustered a big inning against Price, but they got the only run they needed to ensure extra innings when catcher David Ross launched a solo homer over the Monster seats in the fifth.

Lester took it from there, delivering his two best innings in the sixth and seventh, retiring six batters (with a double play) on 16 pitches.

“It was good after the first couple of long innings to get deep in the game and save our bullpen a little bit, which really didn’t end up helping out with the extra innings,” Lester said. “We had to make the adjustment as far as getting the ball down and changing speeds. Obviously, they’re a very good fastball-hitting team, and we weren’t able to get the ball down in the zone as much as we would have liked early on. We were able to do that a little later.”

Lester is now 2-0 with a 1.42 ERA. With five strikeouts, he moved past Luis Tiant (1,075) and into sixth place on the team’s all-time list. Lester is at 1,078, just 30 behind former teammate Josh Beckett.

“I think we fully expected Jon to get back to the levels he’s pitched before,” manager John Farrell said. “We stated in the offseason, he’s healthy, he’s got good stuff, there’s no reason he shouldn’t get back to that performance level. He’s doing that.”